The root-testing stone was the size of a man's head and shaped like a compressed teardrop. It pulsed with amber light, which the testing master seemed to find beautiful. Wei Liang found it clear.
He had been watching it for nineteen minutes while the line of children moved forward one position at a time. He had already read the following: the depth of amber matched the root grade, the stone flickered for exactly two seconds before settling on its final reading, and the testing master's left hand moved to his recording brush before his face had fully composed itself. This meant the result registered in him before he presented it. There was a small but consistent gap between what the stone said and what the man announced. Consistency was the starting point for prediction.
The boy ahead of him stepped forward. The stone deepened to warm gold. "Common Root," the testing master said, and the boy was directed left toward the sorting disciple.
Wei Liang stepped forward when directed.
He placed his palm on the stone. It felt cool, then went dark — the amber simply vanished, which he had not seen happen in nineteen minutes of careful watching. The testing master leaned forward. He adjusted Wei Liang's hand slightly. The stone considered this for three seconds longer than it had considered anyone else.
What it produced was not a color Wei Liang recognized. It was something beneath amber, less like a root and more like an absence where a root should have been.
"Hollow Withered Root," the testing master said, in a tone that felt like someone closing a door. He wrote without looking up: "Defective. No cultivation pathway. Recommend: auxiliary assignment."
Wei Liang read this upside down and filed it away.
He was directed right. Three other children stood there already. He did not speak to them. He watched the remaining tests and memorized the connection between stone color, announcement, and the testing master's involuntary left-hand movement. By the time the line finished, he had a complete understanding of how the stone communicated root grade. He did not yet know what he would do with this knowledge, but he filed it away.
The thought in the back of his mind, which he had no name for yet, had come during the three days he spent alone in the ruins of Cangling checking bodies in a way that the surviving Iron Hollow Sect patrol found unsettling, leading to his arrival here. It made a quiet note that he felt rather than read, like a page being turned and written on, like an account being opened.
He noted this and walked with the others toward the auxiliary workers' compound.
---
The dormitory was built against the eastern wall, where the wind hit wrong. It had forty-three occupants. Wei Liang mapped the hierarchy in three days without speaking to anyone directly: who ate first, who had the best cot positions, and who deferred to whom in the narrow corridor between bunks. The structure of small power was the same everywhere. He had learned it in Cangling before he had words for it. He simply applied the same understanding to a new room.
On the fourth day, a senior worker named Shen took his food portion without speaking to him. Wei Liang let it happen. One incident was just noise.
On the seventh day, it happened again. He now had a pattern and a subject. He spent two days observing Shen's relationship with Overseer Bao and identified a specific anxiety there — something that existed before Wei Liang arrived and affected Shen's posture when Bao entered a room. On the ninth day, Wei Liang mentioned to Bao during an ore report that he had heard some workers speaking dismissively about the assignment structure. He did not specify who. He did not need to. Bao was the kind of man who filled in blanks with his own suspicions, which were always worse than what had actually been said.
Shen's shifts became challenging. Shen became distracted. Wei Liang's food portions were no longer redirected.
He noted the method as effective. He noted Bao as a tool with a known trigger point. He noted Shen as a closed account and did not think about him further.
The presence in the back of his mind recorded all of this in its silent way and turned another page.
---
He found the first cultivation technique by following a simple principle: places where people store things they no longer value but cannot bring themselves to throw away are rarely locked. The records storage room at the end of the auxiliary compound's eastern corridor had a latch that had been broken for what looked like two seasons and not repaired because no one in the dormitory was expected to want what was inside.
He wanted everything that was readable.
Most of it was quota records and supply inventories, which he read anyway because understanding the sect's resource flows was worth the effort. The cultivation technique was buried under three seasons of mine output reports — a partial document, water-damaged along its left edge, describing something called "The Breath of Hollow Stone: A Method for Qi Tempering in Spirit-Ore Environments." Roughly a third remained. The surviving pages covered the theoretical foundation and four of what had originally been twelve stages, with partial notes bleeding into an unreadable fifth.
He read it three times and memorized it completely.
Then he sat with his eyes open and focused inward, toward the quiet presence he was beginning to see less as strangeness and more like a clerk he had not hired but had apparently inherited.
The presence reviewed the technique. He felt this as pressure — methodical and thorough, checking against something vast that he could sense the edges of but not the whole. Then it settled, and notations appeared in his mind like writing from a familiar hand:
*Technique: Breath of Hollow Stone (incomplete). Surviving content: 34% of original. Structural framework: intact. Missing: stages five through twelve, refinement theory, elemental integration model.*
A pause that felt like the scratch of a brush.
*Gap assessment: logical continuation of existing structure indicates three possible completion pathways. First: follows author's elemental assumptions — true to original intent, limited by author's theoretical ceiling. Second: corrects a fundamental error in the stage three qi-routing model the author did not identify — produces superior result. Third: discards elemental assumptions entirely — broader application, higher difficulty.*
Wei Liang read this notation three times.
He did not yet know what to call the presence. He did not yet know what it was, or where it came from, or what it wanted, if it wanted anything. What he knew was that it had just shown him the skeleton of something the original author hadn't been able to see from within their own work, and this could be either the most valuable thing he had ever encountered or the start of a problem he couldn't measure yet.
He decided it was both and filed it accordingly.
He could not cultivate. His root was what the stone had declared it — Hollow, Withered, empty as a dry well. But the technique he began reconstructing over the following eight nights, sitting in the cold corner of the dormitory after the last lamp went out, was not the "Breath of Hollow Stone." It was something that had no name yet. It was built from the second pathway the presence had shown him, corrected at the stage three junction, extended through logic rather than tradition. It fit nothing the Iron Hollow Sect taught. It matched, with precision that he noted without fully understanding, exactly the shape of the hollow where his root was absent.
He filed this under: *preparation for a condition not yet met.* He did not know when or whether the condition would come. He recorded his assumption honestly — possible, unconfirmed — and continued working.
On the fourteenth night, he set the reconstructed technique aside and lay on his cot, listening to the mountain wind come through the eastern wall. He thought about the presence in his mind, what it was recording, why, and whether something that kept accounts always expected them to be eventually settled.
He was thirteen years old, with no root, no rank, and no name in the sect's disciple registry. He had a cot, a work quota, and a thing in the back of his mind that wrote things down.
It was, he decided, a beginning.
The presence made its notation. The page turned.
Outside, the Shattered Firmament shone in the night sky like an old wound. The mountain above him inhaled slowly, as mountains do when something deep inside is still asleep but starting to wake up, teetering at the edge of awareness, to dream.